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Twitter ad play chokes third-party devs

Money rules. Not freedom

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Open...and Shut For years people have talked up Twitter as the future of journalism, described it as a freedom-fighting platform and used other such bold phrases. As it turns out, Twitter is just an app. And not always a very good one, thanks to its increasing efforts to monetize the interface.

I suppose it was bound to happen. Twitter, for all its save-the-world hoopla, isn't a charity. It has investors, and those investors expect to make money on their investment. Lots of money. Twitter has been searching for a business model for years, and finally seems to have settled on one: advertising.

Yes, it's boring, but with more than 200 million users, it's not a bad way for the company to make money. Especially if it can force people to stare at its ads.

Twitter recently did two things to accomplish this. First, it took over a significant amount of screen real estate on its iPhone mobile app for a "trending topics" banner. It's so invasive and irrelevant to many of us that instantly howls erupted about how to remove it.

You can't. It's a "feature."

It's called the Quick Bar, it takes up 10 per cent of one's mobile screen, and it's actually designed to host ads.

Oh, and now Twitter doesn't want to allow anyone to use alternative clients that don't feature a Quick Bar. The company announced last week that due to "user confusion", the company was effectively going to kill (or maim) rival Twitter clients.

Phase 2: kill off attempts to get a better Twitter experience in competing clients

Phase 3: finally start making real money

Never mind that the best way to ensure people use Twitter's official client is for the company to actually build a great user experience that its customers want to use, Twitter has apparently decided to take the easier road: force.

But then, it's incorrect to call Twitter users "customers," because we're not, and therein lies one of the big problems for anyone who wants to moan about the change. While Twitter users provide value to the company and its network, we don't directly pay the company any money, which makes it somewhat easy to neglect what we want. (Of course, as Canonical chief technology officer Matt Zimmerman writes, smart companies are those that listen to users, not just customers.)

As the saying goes: "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product." In the world of Twitter, its users just got sold.

There is no user confusion in Twitter land. There was simply confusion in Twitter's offices about how to make money. That has now been resolved.

Even so, it's not clear that this is the best way forward for Twitter. Bryce Roberts, managing director at O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, sounds an alarm about Facebook that strikes home at Twitter, too:

It's easy to say that Facebook, at its best, is about solving big social challenges or organizing information on people....Facebook at its best is when it acts as an enabling platform and gets out of its users way....Facebook at its worst? ...When it gets lusty about data sets and application spaces it sees other start ups winning in like Groups, Q&A, Location and Comments and disregard its role as a platform.

Twitter is a platform. It's a network. Insomuch as the company gets into the game of dictating how its users interact with the underlying platform - that is, controlling which clients they use to access the Twitter stream - it feels like Twitter is out of its realm of expertise, and it could flail. Twitter used to listen to third-party developers - including those building alternative clients - and learn from them.

Twitter would be wise to continue. ®

Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Strobe, a startup that offers an open source framework for building mobile apps. He was formerly chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfreso's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open-source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). His column, Open...and Shut, appears twice a week on The Register.